Verizon has the best national wireless network, but its attempts at offering mobile content are generallydare we say it?uncool. Enter Amp'd. An MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) that uses Verizon's physical network, this new, youth-focused cell-phone carrier brings 99-cent music downloads and cheap-yet-high-tech phones to the number one network.

Amp'd soft-launches today, a sort of public-beta-testing program where they're quietly selling handsets on www.ampd.com without making a big fuss over it. They still haven't set up all of their plans and are still filling their bins with content. But we're excited nonetheless.

The carrier will launch with two phones: a Kyocera phone called the Jet in black and the Angel in white, and a variant of the Motorola E815 that Amp'd calls the Hollywood. All their phones rely on Verizon's high-speed EV-DO network to transmit data, all will have push-to-talk as well as normal calling capabilities, and all the phones will cost $99 with a new contract.

Amp'd's rate plans are a little cheaper than that of Verizon, if you take data into account. They still charge more than price leaders like T-Mobile, though. While you pay about the same per minute on Verizon and Amp'd, Amp'd includes unlimited wireless Web browsing and three months of entertainment services (no word yet on how much they'll cost after the first three months). Verizon charges $5 a month for wireless Web and $15 a month for entertainment after your first month. Amp'd will also let you add on unlimited push-to-talk use for $14.99 a month and text/picture messaging plans for $4.99 to $14.99 a month. Amp'd told us they'll have prepaid plans debuting early next year.

We tried Amp'd's Jet phone for a few days. Physically, it resembles the Virgin Mobile Slider Sonic (check our site in the near future for a review of this product)a pretty attractive, but far from small (1.9 by 3.9 by 0.9 inches) black slider phone with a slightly balky slide. The keys are also too small and flat, in our view. The 176-by-220 screen has well-saturated colors, but is reflective. Sound quality was very good, and we got good in-ear feedback when talking, preventing "cell yell." The volume on the phone's earpiece and speakerphone was loud enough, and we found the microphone was good at blocking out background noise. Dedicated buttons turn on the speakerphone and a VGA camera, which was dim and blurry.

The Jet can do things that few other $99 phones can. It has a real Web browser, for instance, not the pathetic WAP browser on most phones. That means it can browse most sites on the Webalbeit in a very cramped way due to the browser's large text font.

The Jet also comes with a USB cable that hooks it up to a PC to sync two ways. You can sync MP3, and WMA format music directly over from Windows Media Player 10's "Sync" panel, or read the phone's TransFlash card (a 128MB card is included) as a hard drive on your computer, dragging and dropping MP3, WMA and supposedly AAC format music files. You can even sync protected WMAs you bought from stores like Napster, though not music from subscription services like that of Yahoo!. We synced over several MP3s from a PC using Windows Media Player. We had no problem playing them through either the phone's (loud but tinny) mono speaker or through a wired headset, though we couldn't play AAC or M4A format songs.

You can buy protected WMA-format music on your handset for 99 cents a song. (Compare that to Sprint's $2.50.) Just like with Sprint's Music Store, you'll be able to download a PC version of your purchased song from Amp'd's Web site. In a recent interview in Forbes, Amp'd founder Peter Adderton said he will carry about 200,000 songs from the EMI, Warner and Universal labels, but none from Sony BMG.

We really like Amp'd's "Amp'd Live" user interface. It uses lots of dynamic animation and lets you navigate to both ringtones and full-track music downloads via an artist's name, rather than sending you down two different paths. You can buy the songs and content from Amp'd's Web site on your PC, too, and have them pushed to your phone.

We also like Amp'd's edgy content, or at least what we've seen of it so far. Brands on board include ABC's Lost and Desperate Housewives, Comedy Central's Adult Swim, NBC News, ESPN, Snoop Dogg's youth football league and a lot of juvenile "Jackass"-style comedy. Amp'd is also the only carrier to announce Playboy as a content partner. Amp'd needs to work hard to pump up their content line to surpass Verizon's baseline and to match or exceed the wide variety of video available with Sprint's Power Vision. But we think that will happen with time. Amp'd has already announced alliances with CBS, UPN, and a dating service.

We can't truly judge the phone's performance and Amp'd's content because the service was still being set up and the phone's firmware fine-tuned a few days before launch. Our phone crashed repeatedly, and downloaded videos were quite jerky. Also, the Web site's "push to phone" service didn't work, and content was pretty spare. But that's what you get for being let into the store before the grand opening.

With so many of Ampd's selling points riding on their content, we want to give them a chance to build out their catalog. Check back on pcmag.com in January for a final review.

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts...

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